Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. Christopher Turner

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      Reich had managed to trace the origin of the man’s problem to his having witnessed, at the age of two, the bloody scene of his mother’s giving birth to a second child. This had left his patient, Reich noted, with severe castration anxiety, “a feeling of ‘emptiness’ in his own genitals.”²³ However, though he had theoretically solved the case by unearthing the unconscious root of his problem, an epiphany to which the patient displayed no obvious signs of resistance, the waiter remained uncured.²⁴

      Freud warned against too much “therapeutic ambitiousness” and advised Reich to be patient and not force things; he also suggested, “Just go ahead. Interpret.”²⁵ However, Reich declared a stalemate and dismissed the patient a few months later. His first case was a defeat that would plague him. Freud told his disciples only what not to do in therapy, preferring to leave what one should do, as he told Ferenczi, to “tact.” Freud later admitted that his more “docile” followers did not perceive the elasticity of his rules and obeyed them as if they were rigid taboos. According to Reich, Freud deemed only a handful of analysts to have truly mastered his technique. At the Seventh International Psychoanalytic Congress, in Berlin in 1922, where Freud gave a lecture that was the germ of the following year’s paper “The Ego and the Id,” he looked out at all the people in attendance and whispered conspiratorially to Reich, “See that crowd? How many do you think can analyse, can really analyse?”²⁶ Freud held up only five fingers, even though there were 112 analysts present.

      Many psychoanalysts thought of themselves as passive screens for their patients’ unconscious projections and hardly intervened in their free associations. If their analysands were silent, they advocated matching these silences; they joked among themselves that they had to smoke a lot to keep awake during such unproductive sessions. (One analyst who had awoken to find an empty couch justified his having dozed off by claiming that his unconscious was able to dutifully watch over his patient even as he slept.) Reich experimented with this passive technique, but it did not suit his energetic character— he had been attracted to analysis by Freud, who was, as Reich saw it, a dynamic conquistador of the psyche. When Reich put up a blank façade, as some advised, he found that his patients “only developed a profound helplessness, a bad conscience, and thus became stubborn.”²⁷

      Soon after he joined the staff at the Ambulatorium, Reich suggested to Freud the establishment of a technical seminar to explore alternative techniques. When the idea received Freud’s blessing, the first-ever teaching program for psychoanalysts was launched. The technical seminar, initially led by Reich’s superiors, Eduard Hitschmann and Hermann Nunberg (Reich took over in 1924), was aimed at less experienced analysts, but senior analysts regularly joined the debate. It took place in the Society of Heart Specialists’ windowless basement; the “long room with a long table and big heavy chairs,” according to Helen Ross, a trainee who had made the pilgrimage to Vienna from Chicago, was made even more claustrophobic by the fact that it was clouded in cigar smoke.²⁸ The seminar propelled Reich to the center of the theoretical debates then taking place within the profession. In this concentrated, heavy atmosphere, the analysts presented the stories of their therapeutic struggles (Reich offered his foundering case of the impotent waiter) and thrashed out possible solutions in the hope of forging a new, clinically grounded psychoanalytic technique.

      When Freud had introduced the idea of free clinics, in Budapest in 1918, he had also spoken optimistically about “a new field of analytic technique” that was “still in the course of being evolved.”²⁹ In the early 1920s there were two main areas of innovation to which Freud might have been referring: Ernest Jones and Karl Abraham were pioneering “character theory,” and Otto Rank and the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi (who made sure to attend the technical seminar when he was in Vienna) were pursuing what they called “active therapy.” Reich would ultimately try to fuse these two strands, but the former played a greater role in the birth of his theory of the function of the orgasm.

      Freud supposed that a child went through a series of developmental stages during which the infantile libido was concentrated on the mouth (the oral stage), then the anus (the anal stage), and the genitals (the phallic stage)— these phases were normally surmounted in weaning, toilet training, and the developing of the Oedipus complex; only after making these rites of passage could a person accede, finally, to full, adult genitality (the genital stage). Freud thought that neurotics had stalled at one of these earlier stages, where their libidos were prematurely dammed up and spilled over not only into symptoms and perversions but also into negative character traits. In his 1908 essay on the anal character, for example, Freud observed that many of his patients who were unconsciously fixated on the anal stage displayed traits such as orderliness, parsimoniousness, and obstinacy.

      Ernest Jones and Karl Abraham built on Freud’s observations to elaborate on a further series of personality traits for the oral, anal, phallic, and genital types. It was hoped that the analyst, armed with a list of character types, would immediately be able to recognize and understand defective developments, and therefore correct them more quickly.³⁰ Reich’s first book, The Impulsive Character: A Psychoanalytic Study of Ego Pathology (1925), based on his treatment of patients at the Ambulatorium with especially troubled backgrounds, represented his attempt to contribute to this trend toward characterology; in the book he argued for a “single, systematic theory of character . . . a psychic embryology.”³¹

      Because Freud saw psychosexual development as a linear progression culminating in full genitality, it was inevitable that the genital character was destined to display virtues lacking in the other stages. As the historian of psychoanalysis Nathan G. Hale has observed, the genital character was held up by many analysts as the “norm of human attainment.” The individual who had conquered all other stages to achieve the primacy of the genital phase was able to blend the most useful features of these earlier stages in a harmony of traits; from the oral stage, Abraham wrote of this ideal type, the genital character had retained “ forward-pushing energy; from the anal stage, endurance and perseverance; from sadistic sources [which Freud traced to both the oral and anal phases] the necessary power to carry on the struggle for existence.”³²

      Reich, like most analysts, came to assert that establishing genital primacy was the only goal of therapy, but he equated this achievement with orgasm (of which his ex-patient, the impotent waiter, remained deprived). He asserted that genital disturbance was the most important symptom of neurosis. “It is quite striking,” Reich wrote in his essay “On Genitality” (1924), that “amongst the twenty-eight male and fourteen female neurotics I have treated, there was not one who did not manifest symptoms of impotence, frigidity, or sexual abstinence. A survey of several other analysts revealed similar findings.”³³ Reich thought a wave of genital excitement in orgasm would rupture the stagnant dams of repression he saw in these patients and shortcut the long, slow process of analysis by leading them more quickly to full genitality.

      Reich would encourage, indeed teach, his patients to have regular orgasms. When he instructed one of his patients, an elderly woman suffering from a nervous tic that interfered with her breathing, how to masturbate, Reich wrote that her symptom suddenly subsided. He worked with another young man to dissolve the guilt he felt over masturbation, the cause, Reich thought, of his patient’s headaches, nausea, back pains, and absentmindedness. These symptoms apparently cleared up when he discovered complete gratification in the act. (“Guidance of masturbational practices during treatment,” Reich concluded in a 1922 study of several СКАЧАТЬ